> To be clear, the only "government intervention" I'm advocating for is for the prosecution of those that participate in widespread buying out of supply for arb

> To be clear, the only "government intervention" I'm advocating for is for the prosecution of those that participate in widespread buying out of supply for arbitrage purposes in order to ensure the primary market with visibility is the primary means of distribution, and to minimize the level of chaos. The market is penalizing those people long before the government will get around to it. Shelves will soon be stocked again, there are alternatives to pretty much everything that is in short supply, the arbitragers have found themselves with stock that they can't easily get rid of without loosing money as well as finding themselves hated by the public in general. They made poor choices and the market is penalizing them. The danger of your prosecutorial approach is that it is often applied to the wrong people. The current situation is somewhat unusual in that demand is increasing everywhere but these laws are often applied during localized disaster situations (hurricane, etc.) where it would be helpful for people to take unusual/more-expensive steps to get supply relocated. That involves extra costs and price controls work against those initiatives. I think the biggest failure here is the media, whose terrible reporting caused people to believe that there would be a shortage of things like TP and also caused people to focus on hand-sanitizer as opposed to plain old soap, for example. The not-quite-panic buying is unwise and ill-conceived.\